[Sca-cooks] Period statistics?--OT

[Mike Macchione]

Okay... you've awakened the mathematician.....

> > There's this nifty piece of documentary evidence that is little more
than a
> > massive statistics project for the purposes of maximizing tax revenues.
We
> > laymen call it The Domesday Book.
>
> No, that is data. That is not statistics. Is there any evidence that they
> tried to analyze the data as a whole or as part of the whole? Or did they
> simply use it as a catalog to determine how much money they could get from
> a particular area.

Statistics falls into two main categories: descriptive and inferential.
Descriptive statistics is the collection of data and the tabulation of
results.  This tabulation could be anything from simply listing all the
data, to finding averages, standard deviations, etc.  Descriptive statistics
has roots going back to 2000BC (There were records kept in China of revenue
collection and government expenditures).  Also both the new and old
testaments make mentions of censuses (they weren't going to collect the
data, if they weren't going to do something with it).

Now inferential statistics is more recent. Interential statistics is taking
data from a small group and using it to make predictions about the entire
population. Although there were some mathematicians who did some work for
about a century prior to it(Bernoulli, William Petty, Galileo, Descarte,
Gerolamo Cardana), John Graunts book, "Natural and political observations on
upon the bills of Mortality" in 1662 is believed to be the first published
work to show the usage of inferential statistics to make predictions. His
predictions dealt with the determining the population of London, and on the
distribution of deaths (especially in plague times).  He also was the first
to note that male births are slightly more likely than female births.

In a related subject,  the first paper on Probability theory was written in
1563 by Cardana, Liber de Ludo Aleae (The book on Games of Chance) (although
not published til later)

Any other questions??? hehehe

Kael